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We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

dvdkhlng writes "Even though completely copyleft, the NanoNote hand-held platform failed to get the attention of many due to its low specs and the lack of wireless connectivity. The objective to keep things open had its price, and especially wireless technology is a mine-field of patents and NDAs.Now a few gifted hackers designed an add-on card to bring wireless to the NanoNote. It's not what you would expect: WLAN compatibility was sacrificed, going for the less encumbered IPv6 over 802.15.4 standard instead. The resulting dongles won't win a price for the highest bandwidth but excel at simplicity, energy efficiency and manufacturability.Want to see the ugly details? Designs, source code and production documentation are published under open source licenses."Link to Original Source

As the engineer who has designed these boards, I'm very happy with what we have achieved. But at the same time, I feel that the information we have in the Wiki is not adequate for mass consumption yet. I'm preparing a more concise technical description and post a link as further commentary here in a few hours.

dvdkhlng (1803364) writes "Qi-Hardware, the community that brought us the Ben NanoNote handheld computer, have just released their next piece of all-out free and open hardware: the AtBEN+AtUSB wireless dongles. Aiming for a solution that works without proprietary firmware blobs, WLAN compatability was abandoned. Instead the project went for simpler, yet more open 6LowPAN technology.

This hack was tweaked until the MMC/SD controller in the SoC was happy with it. Other controllers may differ. In any case will you need the ability to switch CMD and CLK to GPIOs (without disabling the entire MMC controller) and to bit-bang them at a reasonable speed (at least a few MHz).

So it's quite platform-dependent in its current shape, but you can probably apply the same principles with other SoCs as well.

lekernel writes "After years of passionate and engaging development, the video synthesizer from the Milkymist project is expected to go out of beta in August.Dubbed "Milkymist One", it features as central component a system-on-chip made exclusively of IP cores licensed under the open source principles, and is aimed at use by a general audience of video performance artists, clubs and musicians. It is one of the first consumer electronics products putting forward open source semiconductor IP, open PCB design and open source software at the same time.The full source code is available for download from Github, and a few hardware kits are available from specialized electronics distributors."Link to Original Source